Welcome to my first blog as an African diaspora Ph.D. student.
I began this blog the semester after I passed comprehensive exams to chart my journey into Dissertation Land. I discovered it is a fairly scary place. I needed something to anchor me. Since I enjoy experimenting with how technology can be used by academics to teach, research and learn, I thought a blog might be a good way to explore the graduate training process.
Maybe at the end of this battle for the doctoral degree I will have an ethnographic study of myself and what it means to become a professional historian. I suppose I will also have an archive of material on the ups and downs of graduate student life. Perhaps the public nature of blogging will be an experiment in social networking and facilitate connections between myself and scholars or students of the diaspora around the world. I am most excited by the latter prospect and the opportunity to make multilingual connections, view streaming conferences or advertise article links, etc. Technology should be every African diaspora scholar’s best friend because it has the most potential to articulate “diasporic identities”; to articulate the varied ways that people of African descent are connect and connected, sometimes in many ways at the same time.
Still, the truth is I am not sure what I will have in the end–or if I will even keep up this blog longer than three months. But you are welcome to follow my journey, however long it is. Please provide advice and critique, spread the word by linking to me or subscribing to the feed, and otherwise keep me company in my daily battle for the doctoral degree.
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